"I’m told that in war situations when people are interrogated, you’re supposed to build up two or three layers of story about who you are and what you’re doing, so that if you’re caught by the enemy, they torture you and after 10 days you finally break, then you’re trained to come up with your second layer; and then they torture you even further until you break down into the next one. When you’re just a shrieking skull, you’re shrieking the third prepared story."
— Kazuo Ishiguro, who is “very good at talking without conveying any real sense of himself,” The Guardian
